Social media marketing today is absolutely critical for real success in business, but most small business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs want as little to do with social media as humanly possible.

Social media has become a real bogeyman of sorts, mostly because it’s really just word-of-mouth marketing on steroids and small business owners have no real control over the reaction of their marketing once it gets out into the market itself.

When you remember, however, that social media marketing is simply a conversation that you are looking to shape and mold you are going to have a lot more power when it comes time to implement this amazing tool for building your business faster than maybe any other online advertising opportunity.

Here are some tips and tricks to help you hit the ground running when it comes time to market on social media!

Create profiles on ALL accounts

The most important thing you can do when you’re looking to succeed on social media is not to focus on one or two platforms, but instead to complete a total profile on all of the major networks that are out there. You want to be as ubiquitous and as accessible as possible, and that’s only going to happen when you have social media activity on every major platform that your customers may be a part of.

If you’re local, think local

According to research published by Google, 46% of all searches on the Google network our local – customers (or at least potential customers) looking for answers, products, or services from businesses in their local area.

If you are a small time business or want to focus exclusively on your local area there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’ll want to make sure that you cater your social media marketing and activity to this kind of local effort.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you have to market the same way that major companies do on social media, and don’t fall into the trap of trying to make your business look or act larger than it is. Embrace your local business background and really lean into it and your social media market will reward you.

Create a social media marketing calendar

If you are going to steal one thing from major businesses when it comes to social media marketing, however, you’re going to want to make sure that it is their concept of a social media marketing calendar.

Rather than advertise on social media with a willy-nilly kind of approach and no real strategy behind every post you’ll instead want to plan at least six months in advance (and ideally your entire year) to figure out how you want your social media campaigns to operate and how they should flow into one another.

We’re obviously talking about big brushstrokes here when we talk about making your social media calendar, as you’ll want to keep the spontaneity of frequent posts alive so that you can capture unique opportunities as they bubble pop. But you want to run those kinds of social media marketing efforts alongside your strategy planned out in advance so that you have all of your bases covered.